UMassSafe is a multidisciplinary traffic safety research program housed in the University of Massachusetts Transportation Center in the College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Working for many state and federal agencies, UMassSafe collects and analyzes crash related data, provides online data access, develops training materials and examines data quality challenges within the databases, providing recommendations for improvements.

The Massachusetts Commercial Vehicle Crash Data Tool, developed and supported by UMassSafe is an interactive, web-based tool developed to improve the collection and utilization of Commercial Motor Vehicle (CMV) crash data by law enforcement personnel across the state. More specifically, this tool was designed to enable police officers to pinpoint locations with a high incidence of CMV crashes, in order to appropriately target enforcement efforts. This tool will aid the Massachusetts State Police (MSP) Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Section (CVES) in the identification of crash “hot spots” and to identify statewide enforcement needs. The information available includes the details of the crash, the details of the vehicles involved as well as the quality of the available data.
There are several ways to utilize this tool; including searching for individual crashes, aggregating characteristics to find trends and common characteristics of CMV crashes, aggregating data for each state police barracks or aggregating data by each town in Massachusetts. Two applications are currently available-

Data Explorer Application
This application enables police officers to explore and visualize crash data collected at commercial motor vehicle crashes. It includes data quality measurements, which illustrate the quality of data collected by officers around the state.

Crash Mapping Application
This tool enables police officers to explore and visualize crash data collected at commercial motor vehicle crashes. It includes data quality measurements, which illustrate the quality of data collected by officers around the state.
To learn more about UMassSafe’s work on the Massachusetts Commercial Vehicle Crash Data Tool click here.